The Eagle Huntress

Follow Aisholpan, a 13-year-old girl, as she trains to become the first female in twelve generations of her Kazakh family to become an eagle hunter, and rise to the pinnacle of a tradition that has been typically been handed down from father to son for centuries.

Reviews

The best ethnographic/feminist/sports/Disney princess/Mongolian documentary I've ever seen, even if a lot of it feels overproduced and staged. Daisy Ridley's narration is mostly redundant, Sia's song is, as usual, too bombastic for the film it closes and the filmmakers are so enamored by Planet Earth style of editing they're willing to do the hideous atrocity of cutting away from the truly pure human protagonists of their movie, but the result overall is still a positively crowdpleasing little picture that's incredibly intoxicating.

This joins the long list of great "hybrid" documentaries. It's pretty obvious that the director has a story and vision in mind and will tweak things to make it work and I'm okay with that under curtain circumstances. The movie was exactly what I wanted, it was uplifting, beautiful and sweet with lots of great scenery and glimpses of a different culture and it's way of life all without becoming preachy. Would I have liked more? Yes. Would I have like a more realistic documentary without all the staging and selective editing? Hmm maybe, if the story was about the history of Eagle Hunters than yes but here I think it's fine the way it was and I felt it's more watchable to people who don't normally like documentaries.